>You could stick the codec on the DVD itself? They are relatively small programs. Consumer DVD players have (cheaper) ASICs for hardware-decoding of MPEG. The

>You could stick the codec on the DVD itself? They are relatively small programs. Consumer DVD players have (cheaper) ASICs for hardware-decoding of MPEG. The algorithm to decode is literally burned into the chip. It wouldn't have made economic sense for manufacturers to pay extra for general-purpose CPUs such as x86/ARM/MIPS to enable future scenarios of loading & executing arbitrary code from discs.